Plans to replace beloved temporary downtown park put off

The thwack of pickleballs punctuated the buzz from courtside onlookers while people conversed over drinks in a nearby covered beer garden. A squad of children played soccer on artificial turf, while others on bean bags watched a movie on a big screen.

It was an ordinary Thursday evening at The Crossing at East Cut, a temporary downtown park south of Market Street on the site of a former bus station that has become a treasured community gathering spot.

The site, which sits between SoMa and South Beach, could have been transformed this summer by the imminent construction of a long-planned city park — but something remarkable happened.

Government officials this month responded to the pleas of The Crossing’s devoted fans by saying they would postpone the park project for approximately two years and instead focus on building a 2.5-acre sports and dog park under nearby ramps connecting to the freeway.

“That is, I think, an amazing story,” said Patrick Kelly, a pickleball enthusiast who rallied with hundreds of people to advocate to preserve The Crossing, which occupies much of a quadrangle that was used for bus service during construction of the Salesforce Transit Center and again during repairs of cracked beams in the new station.

“It shows to us the community can come together and get organized and have our voices heard and accomplish something the community wanted and that is a benefit for everyone,” said Kelly, a neighborhood resident for two years.

A retired video-game user-interface designer, Kelly regularly frequents The Crossing, which is surrounded by office and residential towers. He said he worried when he relocated from the Mission District to an affordable-housing complex in the area that he wouldn’t find a new community — but as The Crossing evolved, he did.

Kelly said he was elated when the Office of Community Investment and Infrastructure — the successor to the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency, which owns the land underneath The Crossing — issued a statement saying it was willing to pause the planned park construction “in the shared interest of the East Cut community and the City’s broader Downtown.”

“Given the benefits The Crossing is bringing to the East Cut neighborhood and its contribution to activating and revitalizing the City’s downtown , now is not the time to remove such a resource,” the message read.

Thor Kaslofsky, the agency’s executive director, said that over the past two years, “people were really falling in love with The Crossing,” with all of its activities and events, while the design of the park that was to replace it provided for more passive recreation.

“We wanted to be responsive to the community by pausing and then come back to figure out what people want in terms of a design,” he said.

Years of planning involving multiple public agencies and the gathering of extensive public input went into developing the plans for what was to be called Pelican Park in an area that once contained the now-demolished Embarcadero Freeway and ramps connecting buses to the former Transbay Terminal.

But while all the planning was going on, the unexpected happened.

After the temporary bus terminal was no longer needed, instead of leaving the land vacant for years, Kaslofsky’s agency requested proposals in late 2020 from parties interested in activating the space. A consortium of entities led by The East Cut Community Benefit District, which is supported by property owners, got the job.

Andrew Robinson, executive director of The East Cut Community Benefit District, said he’d been thinking about what could be done with the site for several years.

At first, The Crossing occupied all of the roughly three-acre swath between Main, Beale, Folsom, and Howard streets. Currently, it occupies about two-thirds of the area because construction recently started on two affordable-housing developments on the Folsom Street side. At the Howard Street end, plans for a proposed high-rise residential tower and affordable housing have been delayed .

Robinson called the decision to preserve The Crossing, at least for the moment, “tremendous news for the neighborhood.”

“If we’ve learned anything through the pandemic, it is that the value of these outdoor places has been elevated exponentially,” Robinson said. “The Crossing has become a real neighborhood living room, a place where people gather for sports and recreation.”

The short-term pivot away from Pelican Park was a big request, and achieving it required a lot of coordination among numerous government agencies at the local and state levels, Robinson said.

One of the first people Robinson recruited to help establish The Crossing was Hugo Santana, owner of the The Lightbox Café across Main Street.

Santana, who has experience working with food trucks, suggested kiosks — and now there are six offering food and drink, including the beer garden, which Santana co-owns, and the Red Rooster Taqueria, which is his. Santana said he hopes to replicate the approach elsewhere in The City.

He is one of the investors in the large video screens, which have proven to be a major draw for big sporting events, with crowds of up to 3,000 people for the Super Bowl. Other activities — which have included free youth soccer, trivia nights and corporate events — have translated into a growing business, which Santana said is already at 70% of what he did all last year.

The addition of three pickleball courts in late 2022 was particularly significant, Santana said.

“I didn’t realize how popular pickleball was,” he said.

Charis Ji had moved out of the neighborhood to the Marina District in search of more retail and street life, but returned after taking up pickleball and seeing the lively scene developing at The Crossing.

“Pickleball is a very social sport. That’s what I like about it,” said Ji, who works downtown in finance. “It really adds to the overall atmosphere of this neighborhood. There’s a sense of community.”

Santana said he knew there were long-term plans for a park at the site, and with hopes of getting three or four years’ worth of business there, he designed his operations to be portable. He figured if he broke even and had assets to move, he’d win. But Santana said he’s is glad The Crossing will continue for now.

“We really started with a blank slate and very minimal funding, and we’ve slowly been able to ramp up and invest in ourselves,” Santana said. “The fact that they saw the value and made what I and the community think is the right choice is huge.”